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ON THE ART OF SPACING
Amir H. Ameri
Semiotica, Journal of the International Association for Semiotic
Studies, vol. 121, no. 3/4, 1998, 283-301
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Contrary to what the title suggests, Kojin Karatanis Architecture as
Metaphor is not directed toward architects and has but little relevance
to architecture in a narrow sense (p.xlv). The architecture of Karatani
is - Arata Isozaki confers in the introduction - irrelevant to the building-
as-concrete-edifice that concerns architects (p.vii). However, in addition
to being forwarded by a Japanese architect, the translation of the text has
had the support of a well known American architect and others associated
with the field of architecture. Also, architecture as metaphor plays, as
the title suggests, a pivotal role in the text. It is called on time and again
in support of the texts central thesis. Nevertheless, the architecture that
Karatani calls on to lend support to the text has an illusive presence in it.
It is perpetually referenced in absence.
Karatanis genial distance from architecture, despite its pivotal role in
the text, coupled with the unmitigated embrace of individuals for whom
the text is admittedly not intended, form a riddle at the outset of the
making of architecture as metaphor.
It is not architecture with a capital A that interest Karatani as
a metaphor. Rather, he is interested in using the most pedestrian
understanding of architecture as a metaphor to deconstruct the self-
sufficient formal system based on architecture as a metaphor (p.xl).
Architecture in its metaphoric dimension is, Karatani believes, a potent
critical tool. With it he proposes to dismantle a formal philosophical
system whose roots he traces back to Plato. This may expeditiously and
perhaps too easily explain the texts appeal to individuals within the
field of architecture. In the aftermath of a serious external challenge to
architectures theoretical foundation from the post-structuralist discourse,
Karatanis critical recourse to architecture as metaphor promises to reverse
the tide of influence by putting architecture to the task of removing the
ground from under a formalist edifice in philosophy. However, the
actual task of deconstructing the self-sufficient formal system based on
architecture as metaphor is delegated in the text not to architecture but to
other metaphors, i.e., language, number, money.
Through a chain of metaphors that extends from architecture to credit,
the theme that persists in Karatanis text is exchange or communication
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with the other. There is an inherent crisis, Karatani contends, in every
exchange or communication with the other, inasmuch as this exchange
or communication entails an asymmetrical relationship that cannot be
sublated (p.182). This is evident in the teacher/student or the seller/
buyer relationship as pointed out by Wittgenstein and Marx respectively.
The subordinate and contingent positions of the teacher and the seller
on acquisition by the other point out a fundamental precondition for
communication (p.116). Exchange in its various forms takes place not
between sovereign subjects or fixed and equal entities, but dependent
subjects and contingent entities. Exchange requires, in Marxs term,
a fatal leap. It is possible only through surrender to contingency and
external measure against a relative other as the equivalent form in an
asymmetrical equation (p.163). The asymmetrical relationship between
the equivalent form of value and the relative form on two sides of the
equation in each exchange or communication with the other presents an
inevitable crisis to any formal system seeking to ground itself in autonomy
as opposed to contingency, self-sufficiency as opposed to dependency, or
making as Karatani opposes it to becoming.
Karatani swiftly divides Western thought into two distinct streams
with respect to individual stances on the crisis of exchange with the other.
The dominant stream, which tries to overcome the crisis and maintain
its ground by erasing the asymmetry, takes recurrent recourse, following
Platos example, to architecture as metaphor. In the metaphor of
architecture, Karatani contends, Plato discovered a figure that under theaegis of making is able to withstand becoming (p.5). Ever since Platos
discovery, the will to architecture, understood as the will to construct
an edifice of knowledge on a solid foundation (p.xxxii) has pervaded
Western thought. It is renewed with every crisis (p.18) in order to
resist or withstand all becomings by reconstructing them as makings
(p.xxxi). This will is, Karatani tells us, nothing but an irrational choice to
establish order and structure within a chaotic and manifold becoming, a
will that is only one choice among many (p.18).
To the tradition that by a persistent will to architecture insists on
realizing the impossible, i.e., the being of the ideal, (p.xxxv) Karatani
proposes an alternative. This other is, however, no less driven to
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architecture as a cogent metaphor than the first. Convinced as Karatani
is that it is only through persistent formalization or construction that
formalism would reveal its own ungroundedness and thus reveal its
own becoming, he asks us to push formalization past structure to event
and see in architecture as metaphor, not a well grounded edifice, but
an asymmetrical and contingent relationship with the other, i.e., the
relationship between the architect and the client, the staff, and others
involved in the design process. Karatani asks us to see architecture - at the
clear risk of mixing metaphors - not as a product, but as a process or a
form of communication. This is assuming that the dialogue with and the
persuasion of the client and the collaboration with other staff members
are by far the more dominant factors in the design process.
Communication with the client is, Karatani speculates, conditioned
to occur without common rules because it takes place with the other, who
does not follow a commensurable set of rules (the client) (p.127). The
entire process is similar to, in Wittgensteins term, a game where we
play and - make up rules as we go along (p.127). Architecture is, inother words, an event par excellence in the sense that it is a making or a
becoming that exceeds the makers control (p.xxxix). It is also a cogent
and privileged metaphor for Karatani because contingency insures that
no architect is able to determine a design free from relationship with the
other. This other architecture Karatani terms secular architecture after
Edward Saids secular criticism.
Karatani pursues architecture as metaphor no further. Assuming
that if one wants to discard architecture as metaphor, one can simply
substitute secular architecture as metaphor (p.127), he turns his attention
to practices that fulfill this premise by abandoning the will to construct
an edifice of knowledge on a solid foundation in favor of a practice that
reveals its own ungroundedness and thus reveals its own becoming. He
focuses in particular on Wittgensteins reflections on Language, Godels
on Mathematics, and Marxs on Money, and meticulously outlines
how each criticism exposes a suppressed contingent and asymmetrical
relationship with the other. Through these and related readings,
Karatani demonstrates how - the formalist suppression of the otherness of
the other not withstanding - every system of exchange, inclusive of every
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system of representation, is a form of becoming founded on contingency.
If, as Karatani contends, making is nothing but an irrational choice
to establish order and structure within a chaotic and manifold becoming(p.18), we may readily wonder about makings formidable perseverance in
the face of a perpetual crisis in its unavoidable and constant confrontation
with the otherness of the other. What makes the systematic and prolonged
suppression of becoming possible? The suppression clearly involves
more than a metaphoric recourse to architecture, as much as discarding
it is likely to require more than the substitution of secular architecture as
metaphor. Architecture may indeed be a convenient excuse or metaphorfor making, but as metaphor it is not an entirely effective tool for the
suppression of the otherness of the other.
Karatanis reading of Marx on credit in the last chapter illustrates
how the metaphor of making is augmented by a host of other tools and
technologies that allow us to avoid the crisis immanent in exchange or
communication with the other. Credit, Karatani recounts, permits us to
circumvent the crisis inherent in the selling position, by an incessant
deferment of the settlement to the indefinite future (p.179). Credit is,
however, only one mechanism of suppression among a host of intricate and
multifaceted tools and technologies. Among these, architecture outside
its metaphoric dimension is a powerful and persuasive tool. Whereas
credit provides a temporal solution to the crisis of exchange, architecture
is always poised to provide a powerful spatial solution to the crisis in the
wider context.
Space, of which architecture is a vehicle of articulation, is intimately
implicated in the constitution of the other as such. To begin with, the
conception of the otherness of the other is closely linked to the question of
its place and placement outside. The other is conceptualized by distance.
It is, by definition, spatially distanced. Conversely, spacing can fabricate
alterity, and one can never be certain whether alterity is the prior term ora function of spacing. To space is, in a manner, to sublate contingency,
since contingency is, in effect, a distortion of space and a collapse of
distance. The other whose place is clearly marked on the outside is always
already a sublated or absolute other.
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The subversive role of space vis a vis contingency is acutely exemplified
by Karatanis rigorous though problematic distinction between communal
and social space. Community is, Karatani argues, the place of making.
It is a space enclosed within a certain system of rules, irrespective of its
actual scale (p.144). This monologic space is exclusive of the relative or
contingent other. Karatani locates contingency and the relative other in
the social or intercrossing space. The game where we play and - make
up rules as we go along (p.127) is given to be played out in this other
dialogic space. This invisible entity is constituted outside community
and in-between communities. It is the space of dialogue as distinct from
communal monologue. It is, among others, the place of commerce: the
market place.
Karatani insists on communal and social spaces having to be
unequivocally distinguished, in part, to underscore his unequivocal
distinction between making and becoming by adding a vital and
persuasive spatial dimension to it. The exchange of the conceptual
difference between making and becoming with the spatial differencebetween communal and social space is, however, as problematic as it is
persuasive. In this commerce with space, Karatani is in the subservient
selling position. Space, as the equivalent form of difference, does not
merely facilitate distinction. Like money, it imposes its logic to the point
of subversion. The social space that shelters becoming, also sublates it.
It imposes a conceptual distance that Karatani is not able to overcome,
so long as he conceives of the difference between making and becomingin spatial terms, i.e., an inner communal space and an outer social space.
The introduction of social space localizes the crisis of exchange outside the
place of making. This is precisely where making has traditionally localized
becoming. The crisis of exchange with the other has traditionally found
its resolution in the delegation of exchange to an other space, e.g., the
market place. This is to say that the becoming we are to find or locate in
the social space is always already a sublated or absolute other because of
its unequivocally distinct place outside. Contingency has, in a manner,
no place. It fits into no one place. Its appearance points to the failure of
spacing. The crisis of exchange is a crisis of space. It is the loss of critical
distances and boundaries meant to keep the otherness of the other at bay.
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To assign a place to the contingency that defies spacing and separation, is
tantamount to an exorcise and a sublation by exile. The subversive impact
of spacing on becoming in turn marks the parameters of what is troubling
and problematic in Karatanis disinterest in architecture on the one hand,
and his use of secular architecture as metaphor, on the other.
Compelling and cogent as the main trust of Karatanis argument is, his
acknowledged disinterest in addressing architecture except metaphorically
and through other practices allows him to construct an ideal and to an
extent heroic image of architecture that is not only delusive, but one that
gives architecture the chance to unravel much of what Karatani hopes toaccomplish. Karatani allows himself to reconstruct architecture as a critical
practice metaphorically by keeping architecture outside and at a distance
from the text. In the process, he unwillingly exonerates architecture of
its forceful participation in the sublation of the other. The greatest
appeal of Karatanis text to architects may be his portrayal of architecture
as a practice that is open to contingency and dialogue with the other. As
the practice on which other practices are to be modeled, architecture isabsolved of any rigorous critical self-evaluation, including its participation
in the sublation of the other. As a metaphor of becoming, its practices
assume an aura of critical infallibility with respect to the other. This
portrait is appealing because it masks a contrary practice. This contrary
practice succeeds only when it is masked.
The dialogue between the architect and the client, the architect and the
staff, the architect and the critic, the architect and the theoretician, and
all the others involved in the process of architectural production are not
dialogues, but monologues in the sense that Karatani defines these terms.
Far from opening the process of design to contingency, these dialogues
constitute so many checkpoints that serve to overcome contingency
and potential slippage in the design and production processes. This
particular game is played according to specific rules and strict guidelines.
The dialogue is meant to ensure that the intended building adheres to
established cultural patterns and assumes appropriate cultural form. In
the cultural sublation of the other, architecture has not been merely a
metaphor, but a forceful participant.
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In the remainder of this work, I will try to illustrate how the relationship
that is to serve as metaphor for secular criticism acts to undermine its
agenda and suppress the crisis of exchange or communication with the
other. My intent is not to argue that in the cause of becoming Karatanis
metaphoric appropriation of architecture is flawed. Rather, reflecting
on architecture as metaphor and from a distance, shields it from critical
scrutiny. Behind every metaphoric reconstruction, architecture is afforded
greater reign in the domestication of the other.
Architecture is, from a certain vantage point, an impossible practice.
Faced with multiple possibilities, the architect has no ground for thedelimitation of his or her formal options to the ultimate one. There is
no one lead to follow. The functions of an edifice suggest no one form
and much less a direction. They are, in deference to biological needs,
nebulous and multi-directional. Function assumes a trajectory on the
other hand and becomes highly prescriptive, when it is appropriated by
culture and transformed into a ritual. The latter, though by no means
singular, is distinct and unidirectional. It has unique spatial requirementsand demands a specific setting. Sleeping for instance suggest little by way
of an appropriate setting. Appropriated, however, as an instrument for the
communication and enforcement of, for instance, a cultures sexual mores
and taboos, and transformed into a ritual, it becomes highly prescriptive
architecturally. A case in point is the single family house with its hierarchy
of master and individual bedrooms. The dialogue between and the details
of these delimited and controlled domains or rooms form, among others,a comprehensive essay on proper sexual norms. Without such essays,
design is a virtual impossibility. Architecture is not, in other words, like a
game where we play and - make up rules as we go along (p.127). Rather,
as the point of departure, it has to be played according to rules established
external and prior to the game. What makes Architecture possible as a
practice, is its external and instrumental appropriation by a culture.
The cultural motivation for the instrumental appropriation of
architecture is vividly, though tangentially described by Clifford Geertz
(1973) in his description of religion as a cultural system. Sacred symbols
function, Geertz notes:
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...To synthesize a peoples ethos - the tone, character, and
quality of their life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood
- and their world view - the picture they have of the way
things in sheer actuality are, their most comprehensiveideas of order. In religious belief and practices a groups
ethos is rendered intellectually reasonable by being shown
to represent a way of life ideally adapted to the actual state
of affairs the world view describes, while the world view is
rendered emotionally convincing by being presented as an
image of an actual state of affairs peculiarly well-arranged to
accommodate such a way of life. (Geertz 1973: 89-90)
Although Geertzs description does not pertain to architecture, wecan readily read into his account a compelling description of the role
of ecclesiastical buildings as sacred symbols and by extension, the role
of architecture as another cultural system. We can read the evidence
of confrontation and mutual confirmation between the dominant
world view and ethos of, for instance, the Gothic, the Renaissance, or
the Baroque period, respectively, in the translucent world of a Gothic
Cathedral, the proportional harmonies of a Renaissance Chapel, or theunfolding, infinite universe of a Baroque Church. In each instance, it is
possible to detail how the specifics of individual designs objectivized moral
and aesthetic preferences by depicting them as the imposed conditions
of life implicit in a world with a particular structure, as mere common
sense given the unalterable shape of reality, and how the experience of
each building served to support received beliefs about the worlds body
by invoking deeply felt moral and aesthetic sentiments as experientialevidence for their truth (Ibid.: 90).
In this and similar historical readings, we have the advantage of temporal
distance and a markedly different world view. Both permit us to assume the
probing role of the mythologist, as Roland Barthes (1972: 128) described
it years ago. Focusing, as we may, on the distortion, or the mechanics
of universalizing the particular, it is not likely that we will experience the
culture under study assume the guise of inevitability through the agency
of its architecture. We will not experience the confrontation and mutual
confirmation of the world view and ethos that ecclesiastical edifices were
erected to affect. Such a confirmation, when and if it occurs, goes for the
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most part unnoted. An edifice plays its cultural role effectively, when we
do not see in it the passage of culture into objectivity. It succeeds when we
do not take note of the edifice as an ideological construct, or the explicit
embodiment of a metaphysic. It succeeds when we take its peculiarities
either for granted, or else attribute them to pragmatic concerns, and
proceed as though the latter were immune to ideological conditioning.
This is to say, that those aspects of an edifice that appear to be the most
objective, i.e., impervious to ideological and metaphysical conditioning,
are often the parts more thoroughly conditioned by such considerations,
and at that the most successful from cultures perspective.
Although it is not with great difficulty or much resistance that we may
trace the confrontation and mutual confirmation of a cultures world view
and ethos in the design and experience of its ecclesiastical architecture,
past or present, the same does not hold for secular buildings. The latter
are far more resistive to such explorations, particularly the closer they
are to us in cultural space and time. The more immediately familiar the
building-type, the greater is the likelihood of its appearing as no more thana pragmatic response to very real, practical needs and requirements. The
library as a secular building-type does not readily appear to be much more
than a response to the need for storage and dissemination of books, the
school to the education of the novice, or the museum to the preservation
and public presentation of art, etc. It is not evident how the design and
the experience of these buildings could lend themselves to a confrontation
and mutual confirmation of a cultures world view and ethos or to whatspecific cultural variables they tactfully give the guise of the objectively
inevitable.
If our secular institutional buildings do not appear as patent
ideological constructs, this is not, of course, for want of participation
in the construction and objectification of culture. Michel Foucault, in
his study of prisons, schools, and hospitals, outlined the modalities of
this participation long ago. If, however, the link between the formal and
spatial properties of secular institutional buildings and a particular view
of the world, or a pervasive metaphysic is rarely, if ever, explicit, this may
well be because these buildings manage all too well in formulating a basic
congruence between a particular style of life and a specific (if, most often,
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implicit) metaphysic, and in so doing sustain each with the borrowed
authority of the other (Geertz 1972: 90). Their opacity silently betrays
their success.
The virtual or cultural reality that architecture helps fabricate is both
powerful and persuasive. It is also a fragile and volatile representation.
Its greatest challenge does not come, however, from other world views
or competing realities. Although these challenges can affect profound
changes in the world view and ethos of a culture, they only amplify the
call for Architecture, among other tools and technologies, to forge a new
synthesis and constitute a new reality, where our assumptions about theworld, changed as they may be, are again transposed into our experience
of it. The reality that a culture forges can successfully undergo radical
change, so long as all traces of fabrication can be perpetually erased from
it. The greatest challenge that this reality faces is not, in other words, to
its shape or content, but to its authority and its ability to assume the guise
of inevitability. The challenge where it is faced is to the reality of the
real. Construed as it is in the West to appear as the non-contingent otherof representation, the virtual or cultural reality that architecture helps
fabricate faces a constant challenge to its authority as a self-referential or
nonrepresentational inevitability from its contingent representational
other. This making, in Karatanis terms, faces an inherent crisis in
every confrontation with its non-self-referential or relative other. The
intermingling of reality and representation in the West, is a fatal affair.
John Ruskins experience on the steps of the British Museum is atangential, though pertinent case in point.
Discussing the utterly base and inadmissible practice of painting of
surfaces to represent some other material, Ruskin (1849: 51) writes:
I have made it a rule in the present work not to blame
specifically; but I may, perhaps, be permitted, while I express
my sincere admiration of the very noble entrance and
general architecture of the British Museum, to express also
my regret that the noble granite foundation of the staircase
should be mocked at its landing by an imitation, the more
blameable because tolerably successful. The only effect of
it is to cast suspicion upon the true stones below, and upon
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every bit of granite afterwards encountered (Ibid.)
What forces Ruskin to voice a blame is the undemarcated presence
of the real and the copy, or the self-referential and the representational
in the same space. He directs his blame at the imitative representation
not for being a bad representation, but for being tolerably successful.
He condemns it not because it deceives or hides anything from him, but
because it reveals too much of itself and in effect too much about its other.
The successful mock loosens Ruskins grip on the reality of the real. It
casts suspicion on the authenticity of the original. What distinguishes for
Ruskin the reality of the real from its mere representation is an original
and causal link between the appearance and the substance of the real,
e.g., between, as he puts it, glitter and gold. What Ruskin loses in
the company of the mock is this link. What he loses is the presumed
dependence in real presence of appearance on being.
If the real stone could become suspect in the company of its mock,
if its stone appearance could be taken for an imitation in this company,
then this appearance must necessarily have nothing to do with the realpresence of stone or else suspicion as much as imitation would not be
possible. What the effect of the successful mock indicates, what in effect
is the condition of its possibility and at that the possibility of repetition,
imitation, or representation, is the independence of representation
from the presence or absence of the signified referent in reality as it
is in representation. What it indicates is that real presence is itself a
representation, that only as a representation can real presence ever besubject to suspicion. Reality offers no greater hold on its appearance and
no greater link to its substance than the mock. The company of the mock
turns the absolute other, in Karatanis terms, into the relative other that
it has always been.
Considering that it is the cohabitation of the real and the mock
and not the individual appearance of either that loosens our grip over
appearance, Ruskin suggests that we take recourse to the art of spacing to
regain control. He recommends that we contain the effect of the mock
by framing and separating it from the real. The framing can be either
conceptual or literal. What is imperative, Ruskin tells us, is to either
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conceptually distance the copy by making its appearance fall noticeably
short of the real and as such inexchangeable with it or else to literally
distance the copy by framing it.
In the Campo Santo at Pisa, Ruskin writes, each fresco is surrounded
with a border composed of flat colored patterns of great elegance - no part
of it in attempted relief. Having secured the certainty of flat surface
with a border, the framed figures, Ruskin tells us, though the size of
life, do not deceive (Ibid.: 49). Segregated, and placed within a secured
domain, representation ceases to effect our hold on the appearance of
the real and the mock as two diametrically opposed appearances. In fact,the spacing, literal or conceptual, constitutes our only hold over these
appearances.
Ruskins recommended spacing is not, of course, unique. It
follows a widespread and time-honored practice. Our encounters with
representation in the wider cultural realm are left no more to chance than
they are at Campo Santo in Pisa. These encounters are equally mediated,
carefully controlled, and spatially segregated. We find the logic of spacing
and a multi-layered demarcation of the place of representation not only
in the picture frames and book covers that mediate our experience and
condition our access to their representational content, but of greater
supplemental force in institutional building-types that serve as exclusive
domiciles to various forms of representation, e.g., libraries, museums,
theaters, and cinemas.
The specifics of the design and the particular experience of these building-
types, from inception and through every stage of their permutation, play a
vital role in rendering the modalities of our assumptions about the nature
of the relationship between reality and representation into an objective
experience of it. As vital cultural mechanisms, these building-types see
to the proper dispensation and consumption of representation in a world
of their own making where the reality outside as self-presentation retainsits privileges and remains impervious to the challenge of representation,
in no small measure because of these spatial constructs. A case in point
is the library whose processional organization and spatial characteristics
have remained, despite various manifestations and numerous stylistic
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discontinuities, essentially the same through time. This similarity stems,
in part, from a common aim or logic that is perhaps best summed up by
Michael Brawne (1970) in Libraries: Architecture and Equipment.
Brawne tells us that the purpose of the library is not only to afford
shelter and protection to books, but also to aid the communication
between the book and its reader. To this end, Brawne contends, it
is necessary to manipulate the furniture, enclosure, space, light, and
outlook, to create an individual and particular space delineated and in
some measure separated from the greater space beyond (Brawne 1970:
9). A successful library, he tells us, allows the reader to make not only aplace for himself, but at the same time detach himself, from the world
outside. Crucial to this placement are a heightened sense of transition
from the exterior to the interior and a clear perception of confinement,
order, and control within the library (ibid.). Henry James had a specific
term for this requisite experiential separation: penetralia, i.e., the sense
of penetrating out of the everyday hustle and into the shadowy preserve of
learning (Jordy 1976: 354).
Brawnes and James summations typify the discourse that guides
the design process through the requisite delimitation of options. It is
important to note that they are, on the one hand, strategically concerned
with the question of how and not why, and they are, on the other hand,
based on the evaluation of precedent following a distinct set of criteria
that are rarely, if ever, expressly articulated. The tacit communication of
criteria through a discourse concerned with what and not why is vital to
the establishment and perpetuation of the tradition. These dialogues, far
from being conditioned to occur without common rules, follow distinct
ground rules without which there would be no library definable as a
building-type. It is dialogues as these that see to the perpetual realization
of the requisite delineation, separation, and particularization that Brawne
identifies as characteristics most need in a library. We find this realization
in each of the four distinct phases of the librarys transformation from
the Medieval book-cupboard to the modern stack-system library (see Clark
1901).
From the outset, the book as we know it was placed in a particular
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place. The Medieval book-cupboard or press was the implement of
delineation, separation, and definition of the particular place of books.
Transition and access to this segregated place was subject to a simple,
though effective ritual of retrieval and return, i.e., of locks and doors that
insofar as they regulated access to the books, effectively constituted this
librarys penetralia.
In the post-Medieval library the delineated shell of the medieval book-
press assumed human proportion, while the shelves of the old press took
on the form of lecterns. In place of the locks of the old press, the books
in the post-Medieval library were chained in place, less, it appears, theyventure out of their new delineated and detached place.
Along with the shell, the doors of the old press also assumed a new
spatial dimension in the post-Medieval library. They gave way to a new
heightened sense of procession and transition to the world of books in
the form of elaborate entry ways, vestibules, and monumental staircases.
A telling example is Michelangelos Laurentian Library (Florence, 1523-
71), where a spatially tense and complex vestibule with a dramatic and
monumental staircase detaches the particularized place of the book
behind from its greater monastic context.
The heightened sense of transition to the world of books, with an
emphasis on a clear perceptual and experiential separation, in place of
the literal separation of the medieval press, was to remain a requisite part
of the library in each of its future modifications. The bureaucratic andtechnological apparatus overseeing access to the Modern stacks is, in a
manner, a contemporary supplement to this experiential separation.
In the Saal or wall-system libraries of the 18th and 19th centuries the
books were withdrawn from the middle to the inner edges of the reading
room, and there having shed the chains that literally tied the books to
their place in the previous example, they become an integral part of the
frame that delineated and defined their place. The watchful gaze of the
librarian at the circulation desk, i.e., the 19th century equivalent of the key
to the medieval-press, took over the function of the chain first at the edge
and in later examples and with greater economy at the center stage of what
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Boulle referred to as a supreme amphitheater (Rosenau 1976: 105).
The ritual procession to the place of books, or the librarys penetralia,
took the form of a dramatic and multistage journey in the wall-systemlibrary. A good example is Henry Labroustes Bibliothque Ste.-Genevive
(Paris, 1842-50) where the participant is led past the thick frame of the
outer wall of the library, through the entire width of the building, before
leading up to a vestibule filled with light and a characteristic monumental
staircase. In journeys like this, the staircase in effect detached the place
of the book from the ground, as the corridor divorced it from the greater
space in the background. The double gesture of exclusion displaced andthen re-placed the participant, past the transverse axis of the landing and
through the gates into what by then was a well delineated and detached
place for the book.
The modern stack-system library is both an extension of the Wall-
system library and a reversion to the lectern and stall-system libraries. It
assumes and further delineates the three operational parts of the Wall-
system library: the circulation space, the reading space, and the stack space.
However, the modern Stack-system library achieves its predecessors end,
not by integrating the books within its protective frame, but by separating
and enveloping itself around the books, in a manner reminiscent of the
post-Medieval library, with its clear divorce between the books and the
librarys enveloping frame.
As exemplified by virtually all modern university libraries, the readingspace and the resting place of the books exchange position in the Modern
Library. In a variation on the theme of center and edge that are the building
blocks of a well delineated and detached place, the books move away from
the edge to the center stage of the old amphitheater, now multiplied and
stacked one on top of the other. Having returned the books to the center-
stage, in the post-Medieval fashion, the modern library, in turn, substitutes
the decimal system in place of the post-Medieval chain. As opposed to aliteral chain, the modern library inscribes the identity of each book within
a figural chain. Although the books may readily leave their sanctified and
entombed place within the modern library, pending the elaborate ritual of
circulation and discharge, their identity never does.
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My intent in summarily pointing out a common thread in the diverse
manifestations of the library through time is not to decry the significance
of the differences and the important transformations in the history of this
building-type. In a different context, one may readily trace the specifics of
these differences and transformations to - among other factors - the specific
modalities, shifts, and changes in the cultural perception and definition
of what constitutes knowledge, how and where it is located (localized),
and in what relationship it is placed with respect to its manifestation(s)
and/or representation(s). Within the limited scope of this work, I only
wish to note that each example in its own unique way seeks to assure the
participant that the books are in place and under control. This common
aim reflects, in no small measure, the ambivalence of Western culture
toward the representation that the library seeks to place and keep in place:
writing.
Writing has been, Jacques Derrida (1976, 1981) points out, the subject
of simultaneous condemnation and praise throughout the history of
Western culture for being the purveyor of life and the agent of death at thesame time. It has been commended and censured for immortalizing and
supplanting the author by preserving and dispensing with living thought
at once.
Regardless of its immortalizing virtue, or rather because of it, writing
has been consistently assigned a secondary, subservient role with respect
to speech and condemned for being, among others, a bastardized form
of speech, a dangerous supplement, or in Platos term, a Pharmakon:
neither simply a remedy nor simply a poison, but both at once.
If writing is deemed to be a precarious and pernicious drug, it is in
part because its effect cannot be delimited in space and to its assigned
place and role as the dead imitation of a living speech. If it is deemed
to be a dangerous substitute for speech, it is in part because writing does
not simply insinuate itself in the place of speech from outside. In theprocess, it also permanently dis-places living thought and the speech that
is presumed to be the privileged locus of its presence.
Writing can take the place of speech as a poor substitute and a dead
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imitation of it, if speech itself is a form of writing, that is, if speech itself
functions by virtue of the same difference and deferral that is presumed
to be peculiar to writing. Speech can only be substituted, imitated, or
represented by writing, if it has a repeatable, imitable or re-presentable
form whose signifying function is not governed, or determined by what
it signifies. If the seemingly transparent face of speech was indeed linked
to the features of the landscape of thought it designates, it could never be
substituted, imitated, or represented. If, on the other hand, the landscape
of thought can only be located in the space of representation, if speech
itself must necessarily defer the presence that it can only represent, then
the living thought itself must forego its privilege as a simple presence in
order to appear in representation, that is, to appear at all. In short, what
opens meaning and language is writing as the disappearance of natural
presence (Ibid. 1976: 159) along with, we might add, the disappearance
of a decidable place within whose demarcated boundaries writing may be
put to rest as a substitute representation of speech.
Writing has, in other words, no decidable place. It cannot be readilyplaced, because what we shall find outside every assigned place is, Derrida
(Ibid.) points out, only more writing. It at once exceeds and defies any
sense of place or any act of placement, predicated upon, in the simplest
terms, a clear boundary separating two opposite terms, e.g., an interior
and an exterior.
Should one wish, however, to retain the privilege of speech as the
locus of a living, present thought - all the metaphysical, theological, and
sociopolitical implications of this assumption withstanding - then one
must indeed make every effort to delimit the dangerous effect of this
paradoxical drug to a decidable place. One must make every effort to
place writing: be this in a subservient supplemental position with respect
to speech or within the protective cover of the book, held well within the
bounds of the library. One must substitute a clear sense of place for the
missing place of this dangerous pharmakon: a place from which speech
can be withdrawn to the outside, safe and untouched by writings effects.
The book is, of course, one such place. The library constitutes another
place: a supplemental, immobile, and generalized doubling of the book,
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encompassing and placing the written word in place. This is to say that
the logic at work in the formation of the library is, to a measure, an
ideological response and an institutional solution to the enigmatic place
of writing. It is, in a manner, a defensive measure against the disruptive
effect of writing.
As much as writing confounds and defies a sense of place, the library
systematically seeks to delineate, order, and place. In the space of a non-
place - the undifferentiated space of representation - the library insinuates a
defensive outpost. Mindful of the pernicious nature of the drug it is given
to administer, the library, as a cultural institution, substitutes a formal,spatial, and experiential clarity of place for what writing fundamentally
lacks and denies: a decidable place. This is not only a place for itself,
but also and of greater concern, for the presence it defers. Within the
delineated, distinguished, and highly elaborated confines of the library,
writing assumes a spatial dimension. It assumes an outside. As the
library localizes and brackets the book, it also renders what lies outside
its assigned spatial limits, immune to the disruptive energies of writing.
As a building-type, informed by the cultural and/or ideological
agenda of the institution it serves, the library provides the participants a
conceptual vehicle for thinking the resolution of the paradox of writing in
binary terms. It offers the participant - by design - a spatial experience that
is profoundly alien to writing as the space of a non-place.
The careful delineation, separation, and processional transition thatare the hallmarks of a successful library, put the relationship between
writing and all that one may wish to escape its grip, in the proper cultural
perspective. Following a totemic logic, within the confines of the library
as a requisite individual and particular space, writing is given to stand in
the same relationship to the presence it defers, as inside stands to outside,
path to place, foreground to background, open to closed, upper to lower,
center to periphery, and all other binary spatial and formal terms that arecalled on to create an individual and particular space. Should one even
wish to conceive of the relationship between writing and the presence
it defers, in any terms other than binary terms, one must confront and
contradict the immediate experience of the library. As much as writing
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resists a sense of place, the library successfully resists its defiance of a sense
of place, to the point of invisibility.
If within the confines of the library writing is given to assume aspatial dimension, outside the delineated boundaries of this cultural and
institutional construct, writing assumes a temporal dimension. There, it
is a figure in transition and/or circulation by virtue of that individual and
particular place to which its identity is irrevocably tied: the library. The
production and consumption of this pernicious drug outside the bounds
of the library have the assurance of a destination that keeps the malevolent
and disruptive energies of writing in check and under control.
If writing is a pharmakon, the library is a pharmacy and the institution
the pharmacist who sees to the proper dispensation of the drug. The
cultural participant is, in turn, the consumer of the myth of writing as a
pure remedy, in search of a decidable verity, kept in proxy, deep within the
cover of the book, well within the bounds of the library.
Of course, architectures participation in erasing traces of fabrication- or becoming in Karatanis term - from our construed cultural reality far
exceeds the librarys reach. Museums, cinemas, and theaters, among a host
of other building-types, also institute distinct realms to which fabrication
or more specifically representation is exiled as other. The specifics of
the design and the experience of each building-type vary considerably in
response to the modalities and the particular challenges of the specific
mode of fabrication or representation housed. A case in point is theexperiential difference between the library and the art museum.
Writing, problematic as it is from a certain vantage point, retains
a polite formal distance from the speech it is said to duplicate. The
relationship between the signifier and the signified in writing is, at the
denotative level, blatantly conventional. In art, it is not. The materiality
of the work of art cannot be readily idealized as a mere means to an end
in the way that writing is, without having to attribute the same to the real.
Ruskins dilemma on the steps of the British museum is a case in point.
The segregation and containment of this other mode of representation
require a different strategy.
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Unlike the library that forms a defensive outpost and offers us an
inward journey to a clear and secure inside, the art museum fabricates
an outside and offers us an outbound journey to an other, parallel space
or universe to which art is exiled on the condition of authenticity. This
space or rather this spacing of art is predicated, not on the experience of
penetration as the library is, but on the experience of disjointment and
distance, of leaving one world behind and entering another as Paul Valery
(1956-75) describes it in the opening passages of his The Problem with
Museums. The clarity of the librarys interior is effectively replaced in
the museum with a seemingly boundless space of intertwining rooms ad
infinitum. Here everyone is, by design, a tourist away from home in search
of the authentic in an other space (see MacCannell 1976).
Between the seemingly infinite world that contains art and the real
world from which it is sequestered, the museum insinuates an elaborate
and deep threshold that mediates and oversees the passage to and from
the worlds it fabricates as such. As much as the library tries to encircle
writing, the museum tries to disjoin art by variously disjoining itselffrom its context. We find the gesture of disjointment in every successful
museum as far back as Altes Museum (Berlin 1823-30). The latter was the
first of its type, specifically designed as a public monument for holding art.
Altes museum was the product of long and heated dialogues between the
architect, the royal client, the critics, and other concerned parties regarding
the point and purpose of the museum and the specific cultural rituals that
were to inform its design (see Moyano 1990). Although Karatani idealizes
this type of dialogue as opening architecture to contingency, what these
particular dialogues established were the ground rules for the museum as
a building-type and thereafter the effective sublation of contingency in art
through architecture.
The building that was to inform and delimit subsequent dialogues
and museum designs was carefully placed, after much deliberation andnumerous modifications, away from the fabric of the city, on an island
opposite the royal palace. The ritual procession out to the world of
art took the participant away from the city, past the bridge, and on a
transverse axis across the immense void of the plaza, terminated by a long
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monumental colonnade behind which the main body of the museum was
carefully withdrawn. Past this monumental threshold and through the
depth of the colonnade the participant was led, beneath a grand staircase,
through a constricted passageway into a large rotunda and from there past
another passageway into the galleries branching out in transverse and
opposite directions.
The forms have since varied immensely, but the requisite experience of
disjointment has remained essentially the same in subsequent realizations.
The gestures have been as dramatic as those in Philadelphia art museum
(Traumbauer, Borie, and Zatzinger, 1928) which is carefully placed on topof a hill, at the edge of the city, and the end of a long ceremonial parkway
leading away from the citys center, to the moat in front of Whitney
museum (Marcel Breuer, New York, 1966) that economically, though
effectively, separates the museum from the city fabric.
Another vivid example is the recent corrective renovations and
additions to the Louvre (I.M. Pei, 1989). These in effect turn the Louvre
that initially was not designed as a museum into a proper museum. One
can no longer enter the building through the exterior walls, since they have
been sealed off and turned into an impenetrable limit and a tableau to be
looked at from a distance. Having marked and sealed the boundaries, the
ritual of disjointment and the journey out now begin with the pyramidal
glass entry that leads the participant down twisting stairs beneath the
court and through a sequence of mediating thresholds up into the main
body of the museum.
Much as compliance with museums ground rules is expected,
deviations from the norm are severely criticized and condemned. Frank
Lloyd Wrights Guggenheim museum (New York, 1959) is a case in point
(see Huxtable 1959). Criticized from inception as an unsuitable place for
art, Guggenheim fails on crucial counts. It fails to distance itself from the
fabric of the city and thereafter it fails to simulate the experience of another, distinct, and separate world for art behind its facade. Guggenheims
is a journey in as distinct from the requisite journey out. It approximates
the experience of the library more closely than the requisite experience of
the museum. Suggested corrections have thus included the relocation of
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the building across the street, away from the city fabric, in central park,
where the Metropolitan museum is located (ibid.: 16). Corrective actions
have included the separation of the work of art from the body of the
museum, i.e., the hanging of art works at a distance from the walls, as if
to divorce the work from its place in compensation for the latters failure
to sufficiently distance itself from the world outside. When and if the
dialogue between the client and the architect fails to produce the expected
results, other dialogues intervene to remedy the problem and prevent the
duplication of the mistake.
At the risk of repetition, what I have tried to outline thus far is howinstitutional building-types such as libraries and museums condition
and contextualize our reception of the other, and how they allow us to
conceive of the relationship between other modes of representation and
the real not as an asymmetrical relationship that cannot be sublated,
but an oppositional relationship that as such is already sublated. On
the construed line between the self-referential reality and the contingent
representation, between making and becoming, there is architecturesystematically removing the trace of the other. It is with recourse to
architecture among other tools and technologies that we overcome the
crisis of exchange and communication with the other. The architect/
client dialogue sees to its perpetual implementation. To idealize it as
metaphor is to afford it greater reign. Architecture is, in the cause of
becoming, a subversive metaphor.
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REFERENCES
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Boulle, Etienne-Louis (1976). Architecture, Essay on Art. In Boulle
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Brawne, Michael (1970). Libraries: Architecture and Equipment. New
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Clark, John Willis (1901). The Care Of Books. London: C.J. Clayand Sons.
Derrida, Jacques (1976). Of Grammatology. Baltimore: The Johns
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Geertz, Clifford (1973). Religion as a Cultural System. In The
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Jordy, William H. (1976). American Buildings and their Architects,
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Huxtable, Ada Louise (1959). That Museum: Wright or Worng? The
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MacCannell, Dean (1976). The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure
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